Valve Uses Honeypot to Catch and Ban 40,000 Dota 2 Cheaters

In the last few weeks, Valve has permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts found using third-party software to cheat. These cheaters utilized software to access the game’s internal data, which is not usually visible during gameplay.

Valve’s primary objective was to address the security flaws that enabled cheating in the first place. Nonetheless, the company also took further action to eliminate these dishonest players. “With that objective in mind, we issued a patch as soon as we became aware of the cheating methods,” Valve explained in a statement.

Valve went on to say, “This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this ‘secret’ area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.”